Lisa Moses Leff

Zosa Szajkowski, a Polish Jew, came to Paris in 1927 when he was sixteen. He had attended school but had no higher education. He became a well known scholar, specializing in the history of the Jews of France. He also became a book and rare documents collector. And a thief.
During WWII he served in the French Foreign Legion, and later, rescued from the occupation, in the US military. He helped to rescue thousands of books and documents that the Nazis had looted and later collected more in small villages where they were lying dormant. Then he started stealing them from the libraries and archives where he went to do his research.
His original aim was to save these books and documents that represented the history of the Jews -- the soul of the Jewish community and take them to American or Israel where the future of the Jews lay. But after the war his motives eventually began to change.
This book is a biography, a social history, an intellectual history, and could be a crime novel except that it is true. As for Szajkowski in spite of it all, I didn't find that I could condemn him.… (more)

Leff’s focus is on an historian who wrote under the name Zosa Szajkowski, who at the same time he was authoring a prodigious number of articles and books on the history of French Jewry, was also systematically pillaging the very archives where he did his research. He was transformed over his lifetime from a leading scholar of French Jewish history who heroically rescues documents, to a thief of manuscripts, selling books and pages he had stolen to academic libraries. Szajkowski was born in 1911 to a poor family in a small town in Poland, moved to Paris when he was 16, and eventually escaped Hitler’s Europe in 1941 by fleeing to the United States. He was a book loving young boy and despite his lack of a formal advanced education, he wrote several groundbreaking studies of Jews in France in the pre and post war era. After his escape to the U.S., Szajkowski returned to Europe as a G.I. In the post-war period, while serving with the occupying forces in Germany, he began a systematic pillaging of documents and materials from Nazi archives and shipping them to YIVO in New York. Suspicions grew about his pilfering and selling documents to major collections in the U.S. and Israel. It was not until 1961 that he was caught red-handed by librarians in France, however, another decade passed before he was finally arrested in New York. In an article written in Jewish Week it was said that “not many books by historians seem like the stuff of feature films’ but Leff’s Archive Thief “seems like a cinematic natural.”… (more)